An Armory of Swords Read online

  Keyes could feel all hope die with the falling coil.

  Mars said nothing, but he was smiling, ominously. And he had another Sword in hand. It was soon plain which Sword this was, for the god wielding it began carving out a block of stone, part of the solid cave-roof. It was a huge slab, and when it fell the men trapped in the cave would have to be very alert and lucky to dodge it and escape quick death.

  Lo-Yang collapsed on his knees, forehead to the ground.

  Mars’s companion, he of the winged sandals, was standing back a little watching, with the attitude of one who has serious misgivings but is afraid or at least reluctant to interfere.

  Maybe, thought Keyes suddenly, all hope is not dead after all. A moment later, he could see the sudden opening to the sky as the block of stone came loose. Aiming Doomgiver at it like a spear, he saw the slab twist in the air, and then fall up instead of down, looping through the precise curve necessary to bring it into violent contact with the Wargod’s own head.

  Mars reeled, and his helmet, grossly dented, flew aside. Only a god could have survived such an impact. The Wargod did not even lose consciousness, but in his shock let Stonecutter fall from his hand into the cave, the bare Blade clanging on rock.

  “Now you know as well as I do, what I have here.” At first Keyes whispered the words. Then he shouted them at the top of his voice. “Doomgiver! Doomgiver! I hold the blessed Sword of Justice!”

  Mars, battered, lacking his helmet but refusing to admit that he was even slightly dazed, still pigheadedly confident of his own prowess, came down into the cave with some dignity, treading thin air as before. Mars was coming to take the Sword back, hand-to-hand, from Keyes. Well, Shieldbreaker could be captured that way, couldn’t it? And it the strongest Sword of all?

  While the two men cowered back, the god first grabbed up the sheathed Soulcutter, and tossed it carelessly up and out of the cave, well out of the humans’ reach. Any god who thought he needed a Sword’s help could pick it up!

  Then Mars turned his attention to Doomgiver, and confronted the stubborn man who held it. Keyes noted with some amazement that his great opponent, bruised as he was, appeared less angry now than he had at the start of the adventure; in fact the Wargod was gazing at Keyes with a kind of grudging appreciation.

  “You seem a brave man, with the fiber I like to see among my followers. I would be willing to accept your worship. And for all I care personally, you might keep Vulcan’s bit of steel and magic. Humans might retain them all; we who possess the strength of gods have no need of such—such tricks. But the Council has decided otherwise. Therefore, on behalf of the Council, I—”

  And Mars reached out confidently, to reclaim Doomgiver from Keyes’s unsteady grip—but somehow the Sword in the man’s hand eluded the god’s grasp. Mars tried again, and failed again—and then his effort was interrupted.

  A roaring polyphonic outcry reached the cave, a wave of divine anger coming from the place a hundred meters distant where the Council had so recently passed its resolution.

  “My Sword is gone!” one of the distant voices bellowed, expressing utter outrage.

  “And mine!” another answered, yelling anguish.

  The protest swelled into a chorus, each with the same complaint. Keyes could not interpret the wind-blown, shouted words. But he needed only a moment to deduce their meaning. Mars acting in the Council’s name and with its authority had assaulted a man who held Doomgiver, by trying to deprive the man of his Sword, and intending to fling that Sword away—and Doomgiver had exacted its condign retaliation. The Council of Divinities had lost all of their Swords instead. The great majority of Vulcan’s armory had been flung magically to the four winds, and lay scattered now across the world.

  The uproar mounted, as more deities realized the truth. A number of gods at no great distance were violently cursing the name of Mars, and the Wargod was not one to let them get away with that. He listened for a moment, then rose in his divine wrath and mounted swiftly from the cave.

  His mind was now wholly occupied with a matter of overriding importance—the names the others called him. So he had forgotten Stonecutter, which still lay where he had dropped it.

  Several more hours had passed, and the westering sun was low and red, before Demeter returned to the cave in which she had hidden the Sword of Justice. She had wanted to get it out of the way for a time, so that her colleagues should not nag her with questions when they saw her carrying a Sword.

  Demeter had spent most of the day thinking the matter over and had come to a decision. The Game still did not greatly appeal to her, and it would be best if she gave Doomgiver to someone else.

  On her approach to the cave, Demeter observed the tracks of a pair of riding-beasts, both coming and going, and when she looked in over the edge of the deep hole, she beheld a set of crude steps, more like a ladder than a stair, freshly and cleanly hewn out of one solid wall. Human beings! No other creatures would carve steps.

  Rising wind whined through the surrounding rock formations. The only living things now in the cave were a helplessly immortal demon, strangely trapped in a lower pit, and a few mortally wounded bats.

  No need to look in the place where she had hidden her Sword, to know that it was gone. Well, why not? Let it go. Perhaps the humans needed Justice more than any of Demeter’s divine colleagues did.

  Perpetually at odds with each other as they were, the members of the Council needed some time to realize that their terrible Blades had been scattered across a continent, perhaps across the whole earth, among the swarms of contemptible humans. As that realization gradually took hold, the gods met the crisis in their usual fashion, by convening to enjoy one of their great, wrangling, all-but-useless arguments.

  The only fact upon which all could agree was that their Swords had all been swept away from them. All the Swords, that is, except for Shieldbreaker, which remained, as far as could be determined, immune to the power of any other Sword, and thus would not have been affected by Doomgiver’s blow.

  But whichever divinity still possessed the Sword of Force was obviously refusing to reveal the fact, doubtless for fear it would be taken away by some unarmed opponent.

  For good or ill, the Great Game was off to a roaring start.

  Woundhealer

  Walter Jon Williams

  The horn echoed down the long valley, three bright rising notes, and it seemed to Derina—frozen like an animal in the bustle of the court—as if the universe halted for a long moment of dread. A cold hard fist clenched in her stomach.

  Her father was home.

  She went up the stone stair by the old gatehouse and watched as her father and his little army, back from the Princes’ Wars, wound up the mountain spur toward her. The cold canyon wind howled along the old flint walls, tangled Derina’s red-gold hair in its fingers. The knuckles on her small fists were white as she searched the distant column for sign of her father and brothers.

  Derina’s mother and sister joined her above the gatehouse. Edlyn carried her child, the two of them wrapped in a coarse wool shawl against the wind.

  “Pray they have all come home safe,” said Derina’s mother, Kendra.

  Derina, considering this, thought she didn’t know what to pray for, if anything, but Edlyn looked scorn at her mother, eyes hard in her expressionless face.

  When Lord Landry rode beneath the gate he looked up at them, cold blue eyes gazing up out of the weatherbeaten moon face with its bristle of red hair and wide, fierce nostrils. As her father’s eyes met hers, the knot in Derina’s stomach tightened. Her gaze shifted uneasily to her brothers, Norward the eldest, gangly, myopic eyes blinking weakly, riding uneasily in the saddle as if he would rather be anywhere else; and Reeve, a miniature version of his father, red-haired and round-shouldered, looking up at the women above the gate as if sizing up the enemy.

  Derina’s mother and sister bustled down the lichen-scarred stair to make the welcome official. Derina stayed, watching the column of soldiers as it tr
udged up to the old flint-walled house, watched until she saw her father’s woman, Nellda, riding with the other women in the wagons. Little darkhaired Nelly was sporting a black eye.

  Mean amusement twisted Derina’s mouth into a smile. She ran down the stair to join her family.

  Nelly was halfway down the long banquet table and her eyes never left her plate. Before the campaign started she’d sat at Landry’s arm, above his family.

  Good, Derina thought. Let her go back to the mean little mountain cottage where Lord Landry had found her.

  The loot had been shared out earlier, the common soldiers paid off. Now Landry hosted a dinner for his lieutenants, the veterans of his many descents onto the plains below, and the serjeants of his own household.

  The choicest bit of booty was Lord Landry’s new sword, won in the battle, a long magnificent patterned blade, straight and beautiful. Norward had found the thing, apparently, but his father had taken it for his own.

  “In the hospital!” Landry called. His voice boomed out above the din in the long hall. “He found the sword in the hospital, when we were cutting our way through their camp! It must have belonged to one of their sick—well,” bellowing a laugh, “we helped their shirkers and malingerers on to judgment, so we did!”

  Derina gazed at her untouched meal and let her father’s loud triumph roll past unheeded. This war sounded like all the others, a loud recitation of cunning and twisting diplomacy and the slaughter of helpless men. Landry did not find glory in battle, but rather in plunder: he would show up late to the battlefield, after giving both sides assurances of his allegiance, and then be the first to sack the camp of the loser. Sometimes he would loot the camp without waiting for the battle to be decided.

  “What does Norward need with a blade such as this?” he demanded. “His third campaign, and as yet unblooded.”

  “M-my beast fell,” Norward stammered. He turned red and fought his disobedient tongue. “T-tripped among the, the tent lines.”

  “Ta-ta-tripped in the ta-ta-tents!” Landry mocked. “Your riding’s as defective as your speech. As your blasted weak eyes. Can’t kill a man?—I’ll leave my land to a son who can.” He gave a savage grin. “I was a younger son—but did it stop me?”

  Reeve smirked into his cup. Lord Landry had been loud in the praise of his younger son’s willingness to run down and slay the helpless boys and old men who’d guarded the enemy camp.

  Reeve was strong, Derina thought, and Norward weak. What had her own feelings to do with it?

  Landry put the sword in its sheath, then hung it behind his chair, above the great fireplace, in place of his old blade. He turned and looked over his shoulder at his family. “None of you touch it, now!”

  As if anyone would dare.

  The banquet was over, Lord Landry’s soldiers dozing in their chairs or stumbling off into dark comers to sleep on pallets. Only the lord’s family remained—they and Nellda—all frozen in their chairs by his glacier-blue eyes, eyes that darted suspiciously from one to the next—weighing, judging, finding everyone wanting.

  Derina looked only at her plate.

  Landry took a long drink of plundered brandy. He had been drinking all night but the effects were slight: a shining of the forehead, a slow deliberation of speech. “Where is the son I need?” he said.

  Reeve looked up in surprise from his own cup—he had thought he was the favored one tonight. He swallowed, tried to think how to respond, decided to speak, and said the wrong thing.

  Anything, Derina knew, would have been the wrong thing.

  “I’ll be the son you want, Father.”

  Landry swung toward his younger son, every bristle on his head erect. Slowly his tongue formed words to the song,

  “See the little simpleton

  He doesn't give a damn.

  I wish I were a simpleton—

  By God, perhaps I am!”

  Reeve’s face flushed; his lower lip stuck out like a child’s. Landry went on: “Perhaps I am such a fool, begetting a child like you. You? D’you think killing a few camp followers makes you a man? D’you think you have the craft and cunning to hold on to anything I give you? Nay—you’ll piss it away in a week, on drink and gambling and girls from the Red Temple.”

  Reeve turned away, face blood-red. Landry’s eyes roved the table, settled on his older son. ‘‘And you—what have you to say?”

  Nothing, Derina knew. But the old man had him trapped, obliged him to speak.

  “What d-d’you wish me to say?” Norward said.

  Landry laughed. “Such an obedient boy! Bad eyes, bad tongue, no backbone. Other than that—” He laughed again. “The perfect heir!”

  “Perhaps—” Kendra said, and made as if to rise.

  Landry looked sidelong at his wife and feigned surprise. “Oh—are you still alive?” Laughing at his joke. “Damned if I can see why. I’d kill myself if I were as useless as you.”

  “Perhaps it’s time to go to bed,” Kendra said primly.

  “With you?” Landry’s eyes opened wide. “God save us. God save us from getting another son such as those you gave me.

  “It isn’t my fault,” Kendra said.

  She had been pregnant with a dozen children, Derina knew, miscarried five, and of the rest all but four had died young.

  “Whose fault is it, then?” Landry demanded. The red bristle on his head stood erect. “Blame my seed, do you?” He beat his looted silver flagon on the table. “I am strong,” he insisted, “as were my sires! If my children are milksops, it’s because my blood is commingled with yours! You had your chance—” He gestured down the table, to where Nellda, unnoticed, had begun quietly weeping. “And so did yon Nelly! She could have given me a son, but she miscarried—damnation to her!” He shouted, half-rising from his seat, the powerful muscles in his neck standing out like cable. “Damnation to all women! They’re all betrayers.”

  Edlyn’s little girl, startled out of her slumbers by Landry’s shout, began to wail in Edlyn’s lap. Landry sneered at the two.

  “Betrayers,” he said. “At least your worthless husband won’t be siring any more girls, to eat out my substance and shame me with their snivelling.” Edlyn, cradling her child, said nothing. Her face, as always, was a mask.

  Landry lurched out of his chair, tripped over a sleeping dog, then staggered down the table toward Derina. Her heart cried out at his approach. “You haven’t betrayed me yet,” he mumbled. “You’ll give me boys, will you not?” His powerful hands clutched at her breasts and groin. She closed her eyes at the painful violation, her head swimming with the odor of brandy fumes. “Ay,” he confirmed, “you’re grown enough—and you bleed regular, ay? We’ll find you a husband this winter. One who won’t betray me.”

  He swung away from her, back toward his brandy cup. Derina could feel her face burning. Landry seized the cup, drained it, looked defiantly down the table at his family—frozen like deer in the light of a bull’s-eye lantern—looked at Nelly weeping, at his soldiers who, no doubt roused by his shouting, were dutifully feigning slumber.

  “The night is young,” he muttered, “are all feeble save myself?” Edlyn’s child shrieked. Landry sneered, poured himself more brandy, and lurched away, toward the stair and his private chambers.

  Kendra turned to Reeve. “I wish you hadn’t provoked him,” she said. Reeve turned away mumbling, pushed back his chair, and stumbled for the door to the courtyard.

  “What was that you said?” Kendra called. Her voice was shrill.

  Reeve, still muttering, boomed out into the fresh air. Derina hadn’t heard but knew well enough what her brother said. “No one provoked Father,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what we do. Not when he’s in these moods.”

  We should try to make his time here easy,” Kendra insisted. “If we’re all good to him—”

  Derina could still feel the imprint of her father’s fingers on her breasts. She rose from the table.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said.


  Her sister Edlyn rose as well. Her little girl’s screams were beginning to fade. “Daryl should sleep,” she said.

  Edlyn and Derina made their way up the stairs to their quarters. They could smell Landry’s brandy fumes and followed cautiously, but he was well gone, off to drink in his suite at the top of the stair.

  Edlyn paused before Derina’s door. Edlyn looked at her, eyes flat and emotionless. “Your turn now,” she said. “To be his favorite.”

  Your turn, Derina knew, to be married off unknowing to some coarse stranger—to learn, perhaps, to love him, as Edlyn had—then to have his child, to have him die in one of Landry’s wars and be left, scorned, at her father’s house with an unwanted babe in her arms.

  Derina, a lump in her throat, could only shrug.

  “Good,” Edlyn said, malice in her eyes. She turned and went to her own door.

  You bleed regular, ay?

  Numbly, Derina fumbled for the latch, entered her room, and locked the door behind.

  The courting had already begun, and Landry home only three days. Any number of Landry’s peers, soldiers, and retainers were happening by, all with oafish, sullen sons in tow.

  Few of them bothered to acknowledge Derina. They knew who made the decisions.

  Derina fled the sight of them, went for a long ride to the high uplands, the meadows where the summer pasture was, the close-cropped grass already turned autumn-brown.

  She did not expect to find her brother there. But there he was, gangling body in saddle as he rode along the low dry-stone walls that separated one pasture from another. Nearsighted, Norward didn’t see her until she hailed him.

  “Inspecting the walls,” he said.

  “No point in doing that till spring.”

  “I wanted t-to get away.”

  “So did I.”

  He shrugged, pulled his cap down against the autumn highland wind. “Then r-ride the walls with me.”